In 2013, an asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, creating a shockwave that injured 1,500 people and destroyed 7,200 buildings across six cities. The six-mile-wide Chicxulub Asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago wiped out 70% of all species on earth, including the dinosaurs. Not to take away anything from that historic NASA achievement, but the moon poses no threat to anyone on earth, save for the occasional rip tide. That seems strange, because this feat is arguably as important as the 1969 landing of a man on the moon. Pundits haven't been opining about its meaning. It hasn't been treated as an event whose implications deserve further exploration. So far, this story has been a two-day wonder. 11 announcement that the crash had achieved its goal of knocking the asteroid off course. 26, the media weighed in on NASA's successful crashing of a golf-cart-sized spacecraft into an asteroid. (NASA/John Hopkins APL photo)Įven the media reports on the agency's Double Asteroid Redirection Test have been fragmentary.
A watershed moment meaning trial#
“the exact moment that changes the direction of activity or situation… from which things will never be the same”.The asteroid Dimorphos, as seen from the spacecraft that crashed into it 11 seconds later in NASA's trial run to save the earth from asteroids.
This use only make sense if you are using the term as a dividing point. Because watershed is used much more actively as a verb in Europe, and often as a noun in North America, one is much more likely to hear watershed used figuratively, such as the sentence from the Daily Telegraph in June 1999: “The Balkans conflict is at a watershed between a diplomatic settlement and the prospect of a ground war”. The meaning of which flows into our last and final definition – “watershed moment”.Ī watershed moment, or point, or year – is that divide, that moment when a drop of rain becomes set on its path as applied to human culture and events. Taken together it means:Ī watershed is an area of land that drains all the streams and rainfall to a common outlet such as the outflow of a reservoir, mouth of a bay, or any point along a stream channel. From this, the drainage basins that this term forms becomes a noun, and is the same use that we in North America learn in schools today. It didn’t enter common usage until the 1870’s as the first real hydrology surveys were being completed and it refers not to a high point from which water shed, but instead “the slopes down which the waters run”. No one is really sure why, perhaps a mistranslation, but from it’s first use in North America, “Watershed” really was used more like “Water-shed”. From where a drop of water lands to how far it flows to an ocean or final body of water. This form of watershed meant “a mountain range which sends waters to different river areas or seas“, and is still the predominant meaning for the term in Europe and England, which is used often to discuss water flowing from a high place. This gives us the modern definition of Watershed in the United Kingdom as:Ī watershed is high ground from which water flows down to a river” Cambridge Dictionary, 2019 In North America, watersheds predominately refer to the place in between the ridges or high points. While this particular spelling was short lived, it soon became our modern form – ‘Watershed’ – and shifted from being treated like an adopted translation to a verb meaning “to shed”, As it became adopted into English, it used both the root word in Anglo-Saxon (scheadan) as from the German (scheide), and the same root as the verb “to shade”. In Britain and Europe, watershed predominately refers to the ridge, or high point from which water flows to a river. Both the German word, and this translation take the term literally as a high point, or ridge, with from which water sheds to either side. Even then, it took it a few years to find it’s scholarly footing, Early translations in Britain such as that by John Hershel in Encyclopædia Britannica, writing on Physical Geography, used the form ‘Water-sched’, treating it as a direct translation from the new German root word “Wasser-scheide” (meaning specifically water-divorce).
Waterways and ecosystems have long played a prominent role in indigenous knowledge, as well as for all life on earth and the development of human cultures as pathways for transportation, trade, exploration and often as boundaries, and it is easy to forget that our understanding and relationship to watersheds was very different than our own today until very recently.Īs an English word in the context of a geographic and scientific term, Merriam Webster puts the first use of Watershed to 1803, while other sources say 1808.
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